Clemson University TigerPrints All Theses Theses 5-2009 Living in (Im) Material Worlds: Modes of Production and Consumption in Utopian Literature Pauline Spangler Clemson University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Spangler, Pauline, "Living in (Im) Material Worlds: Modes of Production and Consumption in Utopian Literature" (2009). All Theses. 591. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/591 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses at TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact [email protected]. LIVING IN (IM) MATERIAL WORLDS: MODES OF PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION IN UTOPIAN LITERATURE A Thesis Presented to The Graduate School of Clemson University In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts English By Pauline E. Spangler May 2008 Accepted by: Dr. LeMahieu, Committee Chair Dr. Elizabeth Rivlin Dr. Brian McGrath 2 ABSTRACT My thesis examines and defines “conditions of production” and “conditions of consumption” as they apply to both Marxist economic theory and to the more culturally- oriented production and consumption of literary texts according to Pierre Bourdieu. I will establish the relationship between these conditions as cause and effect, complementary, and, finally, mutually necessary depending upon their context and manifestation. Alterations in the conditions of production and consumption affect our treatment of their corresponding, associative dichotomies in the literary tradition – the transcendent and the material, the spiritual and the corporal, the well-wrought art object and the commodity fetish, and, finally, male and female. I will finally demonstrate how the utopian text in particular, with its paradoxical goals of social change and mass marketability, both alludes to and eludes these categorizations as it projects and capitalizes on new, other worlds. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you so much to everyone who helped, critiqued, and supported me through this process. I very much appreciate the advice and assistance of my readers, Dr. Rivlin and Dr. McGrath, and especially my chair, Dr. LeMahieu, in helping me form this work into a cohesive and readable whole. On a more personal note, I would like to thank my parents and particularly my husband for all their encouragement on my research and in my decision to pursue graduate studies. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE TITLE PAGE ....................................................................................................... i ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................... iii INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................5 CHAPTER I .......................................................................................................15 CHAPTER II ......................................................................................................33 CHAPTER III .....................................................................................................53 CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................69 WORKS CITED .................................................................................................78 5 INTRODUCTION UTOPIA’S SELF-CONFLICTED FORM We often examine utopian literature more for its failures than for its successes. It is a genre consistently labeled by academic and layperson alike as escapist, totalitarian, retrograde, irrelevant, and nonsensical. Utopias do not know their “place.” They attempt to create fantastical, wish-fulfilling visions of different worlds for a mass audience, and broach large questions of ontology. In our current era that avoids the fixation of meaning, utopian writers attempt to manufacture worlds that embody a form of Truth. They do not, however, take up this burden unknowingly: utopian texts give a significant wink to their readers, signaling that their elaborate constructions are both games in themselves and participants in the game of creating meaning. Utopias therefore conjoin philosophical significance with escapist wish-fulfillment, earnestly striving to create a perfect society while at the same time hinting that such efforts will necessarily be imperfect. An analysis of the material conditions surrounding the creation of utopia may better inform us about its paradoxes and eccentricities in form and content. In this thesis I examine modes of economic and artistic production and consumption in utopian fiction, also sometimes labeled speculative fiction. I view a production-oriented Marxist criticism of socioeconomic alterity in utopian fiction and a consumption-oriented cultural and aesthetic criticism of the utopian imagination’s mass form in conversation and cross- pollination with one another. Utopian producers through the history of the genre foresee their worlds becoming appropriated by the dominant, and therefore consciously choose the moments of their textual failures in order to both highlight and criticize the 6 impossibility of genuine dissent in the world order of state capitalism. However, when we include these utopian works’ conditions of consumption, moments of both radical re- appropriation and further subsumption by normative values appear: the unpredictability of public reactions to and use of these utopian texts attests to their potentially transformative nature. Ultimately then, utopia is liberated from the logic of its productive conditions to become common property, the people’s literature – albeit that of capitalist consumer’s – for better or for worse. While this thesis focuses on the ways in which modes of production and consumption shape the texts themselves, they also shape the works’ individuals authors and authorities. Utopian literature’s various self-abrogations may or may not be formulated through authorial “intentionality.” Utopian critics such as Fredric Jameson argue that the process of a “one-dimensional” system or a permanent “state apparatus” through the logic of late global capitalism by definition negates alterity; if this is so, then these internal nullifications may have always already been inscribed into utopian texts that would otherwise seek alternative social forms. However, a perhaps more hopeful critical stance grants our utopianists the ability to choose their instances of textual failures (whether of style, structure, or the imagination), and imply that such foreknown and recursive shortcomings operate as critiques of a system that does not allow for an imaginable overthrow. Speculative fiction is both complicit with and critical of its dually profit-seeking and activist motivations. Its association with what Pierre Bourdieu labels a “fundamentally heteronomous, middle brow culture” (129) complicates matters further – 7 the artistic production of utopia depends upon consumption on a mass scale, implicating this form in the vicissitudes of the capitalist marketplace. “Success” for a product of speculative fiction thus means a fetishized aesthetic dissonance with our globalized capitalist system as well as an equally avid participation in the buying and selling of literary goods: no wonder the genre’s manifold tensions. Nevertheless, by this same process utopias manage to avoid the economy of “bad faith” that more highbrow forms may be accused of, in which association with capital is not needed by a previously established social elite. They also avoid a culture of “bad art” that accompanies bourgeois consumption, in which artistic representations are just slightly different iterations of previously successful products. This unique problem and promise as a form of experimental, yet mass-consumed art form establishes the utopian genre as a field which may give scholars a key to understanding the methodologies of aesthetic reification and resistance. Bourdieu’s discussion of the artistically “legitimized form of middle-brow art, the Western” (128) makes for a helpful parallel to our study of utopian literature as it struggles for legitimate influence in the economic and cultural spheres: Producers of Westerns have to work within the very strict conventions of a heavily stereotyped genre…referring back to previous solutions – assumed to be known – in the solutions they provide to canonical problems, and they are continually bordering on pastiche or parody of previous authors, against whom they measure themselves. (128) Bourdieu argues that this aesthetic process invites a “second-degree reading” and “authorizes detached and distanced perception, quite as much as first-degree adherence, 8 and calls for either erudite analysis or the aesthete’s wink” (128). The intrinsic limitations and conventional tropes of a particular genre, therefore, can ironically invite a better avenue for a multiplicity of interpretations, free from the binary of high criticism for an academic elite and base entertainment for the masses. Speculative fiction employs a convention of unconventionality that follows recurring patterns of spatial or inner exploration, a “play” with newly imagined sociopolitical forms, and even a Bakhtinian employment of carnivalesque excess. Perhaps, then, utopias require